Tell Your Face!

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As I may have mentioned before, I do a lot of talks – about 200 a year at the last count – to all sorts of organisations all over the country: corporate events, dinners, festivals, lunch clubs, U3As, Probus Clubs, WIs, etc. So I’ve seen a lot of different audiences and learned a few things about them along the way. The first is how important the lay-out of the room is to the audience reaction you will get – and I think this applies to pretty much any performer. The best lay-out is invariably when the audience are sitting fairly close-packed in rows like a normal theatre or cinema lay-out. The worst is when they are scattered over a large area, particularly if they are all seated at tables. The reason is fairly obvious; audiences feed on the reactions of each other. If you hear your neighbour burst out laughing, that encourages you to do the same, but if you’re surrounded by an ocean of silence, it takes a very self-confident man or woman to laugh out loud. 

The second thing is that the age, ethnicity, sex and social class of the group also has a powerful impact on how they react. In terms of visible audience reaction I’ve found the hardest groups to read are middle-class, white, professional males of a certain age. I’ve spoken to some groups and been entirely uncertain whether my talk is going down like a storm or a cup of cold sick until after I’ve finished, when they will often come up and say something like “That was one of the best talks we’ve ever had.” To which my instinctive response, were I not able to suppress it, would be to say “Well, tell your face next time, because you looked like a bulldog peeing on a thistle while I was doing it.”  

There will also always be at least one stone-faced individual in an audience who invariably manage to seat themselves front and centre and could not crack a smile if it killed them. The best example of that was a titled lady who attended one event I did – a three-hander with two other speakers. Her expression did not alter from glacial throughout my talk, but it turned out that it was nothing personal because she remained equally unmoved during the other two talks as well. When I asked the organiser why the titled lady had bothered to turn up, since she obviously hated the whole experience so much, he told me that she had come to support one of the other speakers, who was her close friend. She had an unusual way of showing her friendship, because her expression was` just as hostile during her talk as it had been during mine.

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